Tag: gay bars
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The Closet Queen’s Guide to Cleveland for the 2016 RNC
AIDS Taskforce Our center welcomes everyone whether they have HIV or not Ambiance Our home-grown erotic boutique has a wide range of condoms, restraints, and women’s lingerie at several suburban shops b.a. Sweetie Sugar babies and chocolate galore at the nation’s largest candy store Blow Hair & Nail Spa Sit back and relax and…
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Consulting an Expert: If Orlando wasn’t terorrism, why do gays feel terrorized?
Greggor Mattson, interviewing Lisa Stampnitzky, author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” and Politics Lecturer at Sheffield University. GM: Experts have been walking back classifications of Omar Mateen’s massacre at Orlando’s pulse nightclub as terrorism. And yet, LGBTQ people have consistently described the attack as terrorism. How can we understand the different understandings of…
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Article: Post-Orlando Truth For You: Gay Bars Aren’t ‘Safe Spaces’
This piece was picked up by The Daily Beast, thanks to Melissa Petro of Becoming Writers and including suggestions from TDB editors and several friends. Read it here, or contact me for the archived version. Save Save Save
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Violence at gay bars and the police
Police actions in the aftermath of the terrorist massacre at Orlando’s Pulse were heroic. This is noteworthy because until recently police were often agents of violence at gay clubs. For most of the 20th century, going to gay bars meant that “you may be placing yourself in a position that you’re not just going to…
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Terrorism and gay bars
Gay bars have always been sites of danger, Terrorists and gay bashers have long used gay bars to find LGBTQ people- only last weekend, my boyfriend and I had “faggots” shouted at us from a speeding car outside a Columbus, Ohio gay bar. The massacre at Pulse’s nightclub is the worst mass shooting in U.S.…
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Lesbian bar, queer futurities?
What if the paucity of lesbian bars represented not a present failure or a return to a bad gay past, but the future of queer sociality for everyone? This was the challenge posed by Lyndsey Beutin when she, Crystal Biruk and I hung out a couple weeks ago. When San Francisco’s Lexington Club closed in…
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Christmas in a gay bar
I haven’t yet told you why I go to gay bars to get loaded on Christmas Day. I go to hear the stories. You haven’t heard anything until you’ve gone to a gay bar on Christmas Day and heard the stories… I have discovered that among those of us hanging out in bars on Christmas…
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The fate of rust belt gay bars
Nothing dramatizes the collapse of the Cleveland gay bar scene than this list of nominees for best gay bar from 2010. Seven of 10 have closed (n.b.: Bounce reopened): No new gay bars have opened between 2010 and 2015 that weren’t replacing an existing gay bar, so the failure of 7/10 isn’t a function of…
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Thanks aren’t enough for gay bars
There’s a nice profile of the last gay bar in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, Aunt Charlie’s. I hadn’t realized their famous drag shows were only an invention of 1998, the beginning of the end for the Tenderloin. In 1999, I counted 13 bars in the greater Tenderloin/Polk Street corridor; there were 6 by 2004 and…
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Article: Style and the Value of Gay Nightlife: Homonormative Placemaking in San Francisco
Another of my journal articles on San Francisco gay bars appears in the current edition of Urban Studies. My very simple point is not all gay neighborhoods are (or were) the same. The point was so simple it languished in 4 journals for 7 years, going through 9 revisions. But now it’s out – complete…
Greggor Mattson 